How to Highlight Hair Using a Cap

Highlights can add dimension and color to anyone’s hair. If you go and get highlights done at a salon, you’ll pay 50 dollars or more. For less than 10 dollars, you can pick up everything you need to do your own highlights at home.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Highlighting or frosting cap
• Highlighting powder
• Developer
• Highlighting needle
• Toner
• Conditioner

1. Make a trip to your local beauty supply store to get all your supplies. Choose a highlighting cap that suits your specific needs. Some highlighting caps offer chunky highlights while others offer a more natural look. If you want to regularly highlight your own hair, it is better to buy the products in bulk. You can save a lot of money doing this. However, if you’re not sure, just get the smaller sizes.

2. Comb your hair out. This will make pulling your hair through the highlighting cap much easier and it will ensure an even distribution of the highlights.

3. Mix the highlighting powder and developer together. Read the directions on the bottle and mix the developer and powder accordingly.

4. Take the highlighting needle and pull sections of your hair through the highlighting cap. Carefully inspect each section that you pull through. You want to make sure that you have all of the hair and not just a piece of a strand. Otherwise, the highlights could come out uneven.

5. Coat each strand with the mixture of the powder and developer. Make sure each strand is evenly saturated with the mixture.

6. Allow the highlights to process for 20 to 30 minutes. Check them every 10 minutes to see how they are progressing. Once the highlights are done, shampoo your hair.

7. Tone it down if you need to. Once your highlights are done, carefully inspect your hair. If you think the highlights are too bright, apply a toner. There are various toners which will make highlights more beige or more golden. Allow the toner to process for 15 to 20 minutes and then shampoo your hair.

8. Deep condition your hair. Any hair color process can damage your hair and cause it to be dry. Following a highlighting treatment, you always want to deep condition your hair. If you have a lot of time, try to leave the conditioner in for 30 minutes or longer. This will give your new highlights extra sheen and moisture. Once the time is up, rinse out your hair. Lastly, style your hair and show off those new highlights!

Tips & Warnings

• To maintain the brightness of your highlights, wash your hair once a week with a highlight boosting shampoo.
• When highlighting your hair, make sure you don’t touch your clothes. The highlighting powder is really powerful and it will bleach just about anything.